In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Facebook advertising. This Facebook advertising guide is perfect for beginners who are looking to bring in more revenue for their business. Maybe you’ve just opened your online store and are looking for ways to generate your first sales. If so, this Facebook ads guide is perfect for you.

Are you considering running Facebook ads? After all, Facebook advertising for beginners or even seasoned marketers is possibly the most effective ways to promote your products to more than 1.5 billion people around the world. You’ll be able to target specific audiences in any niche with Facebook ads, so you’ll gain a lot of vital information from this Facebook advertising guide.

If you’re just a beginner it can seem a bit complicated, but don’t worry. In this Facebook advertising guide you’ll learn everything from pixels and conversion tracking, to numerous campaign objectives and the mysterious Power Editor tool.

I’ll share the fundamentals of Facebook advertising for beginners. That way you can launch your first successful Facebook ads campaign without wasting your time or money.

Let’s get started!

Why Facebook Advertising?

There are more than 1.59 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Thus, some of your potential customers are definitely using it too. The only question is how to reach them effectively.

Facebook advertising offers ecommerce entrepreneurs with extensive targeting options. Notably, you can reach people not just by location (countries, states, cities and even zip codes), gender, and age, but also by millions of interests, behaviors, life events, and many other descriptions.

In addition, you can promote pretty much any content suitable for your business: from text posts, photos and albums, to videos, events, offers and, of course, links to your website.

When you combine an enormous user base, incredible targeting options, and a variety of ad objectives, it becomes clear why Facebook advertising is a truly powerful tool for ecommerce entrepreneurs. We’ve broken down how Facebook advertising works below:

How Do Facebook Ads Work?

In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll learn how Facebook ads work.

Facebook’s goal is to find the most effective way to allocate the limited advertising space they have.

They achieve it by running thousands of mini auctions every second, with advertisers competing against each other for ad space. If you happen to win such an auction, you’ll be charged and your ad will be displayed to the audience you chose.

And how much does Facebook advertising cost?

Well, it depends.

Because of these auctions, your Facebook advertising costs will depend on many factors. Factors include: the country, the audience, the ad placement, and even how good your ads are.

For example, there’s much more competition in the US, so you’ll have to pay more to reach the same amount of people compared to a cheaper country, like Thailand. Even within the US, some audiences can be twice or even three times more expensive to reach – you’ll have to test it for your own business and evaluate the results. In fact, Facebook advertising involves a lot of testing. Try out what you think will work and adapt your campaigns to optimize them.

Now that you know how Facebook advertising works, let’s have a look at how to create an actual campaign.

Billing:

Once you’re happy with the account settings and billing, let’s move to researching your audience.

Facebook Ads Guide: Audience Research

In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll learn about audience settings.

Finding the right audience is the most critical part of Facebook advertising.

If you choose an audience that’s not relevant enough to your ad, you’ll waste some of your vital budget on reaching the wrong people.

So when it comes to targeting with Facebook advertising, I like to get super specific. For example, aiming for an audience in the US that’s from 50,000 to 100,000 people. If it’s a smaller country, the potential audience could also be even smaller.

You should avoid using generic interests, like nature, sports, or food and choose very specific ones instead: relevant brands, authors, books, magazines, websites or even other Facebook pages. If you’re looking to get ahead of the game with your Facebook advertising you should research into what interests your customers have.

Go to Audience Insights and enter the “seed audience” you want to analyze in the sidebar:

Then, click “Page Likes” on the top menu bar and scroll down to see a list of other pages, relevant to the audience you selected.

In the example above, we can see that people who are interested in “running” also follow specific pages like “Spartan Race”, “Nike+ Run Club”, “Runner’s World”, and many others.

So instead of using “running” as an interest to promote your running shoes, choose interests like Runner’s World, Nike Running, or RunHaven for your targeting to reach more relevant people.

After you’ve created a list of potential interests and decided on which product to promote, let’s create that Facebook advertising campaign.

2. Facebook Ads Guide: During

How to Create a Facebook Advertising Campaign:

In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll learn how to create your Facebook ads campaign.

There are three main ways to launch a Facebook ad campaign:

Boost post on Facebook Pages,

Self-serve Ads Create tool,

Power Editor tool.

Boost Post is the quickest and easiest way to promote your content, but it’s also the least effective one – I suggest you to stay away from it.

Power Editor, on the other hand, is a bit too complicated, especially for beginners. Although it gives you all the campaign features that you’d ever want, it’s not as intuitive to use.

So in this Facebook ads guide, we will create ads in the Ads Manager with the Ads Create tool. It gives you most of the campaign settings but is easier to use.

Choosing Your Campaign Objective:

First, go to the Ads Create page by clicking on this link or clicking on the small arrow in the top right corner of your Facebook profile and choosing “Create an Ad”.

You will immediately see a list of the main campaign objectives that you can choose from:

There are 15 campaign objectives (although some are only accessible through Power Editor), and you should always go with the one that’s the most relevant to your end goal.

The reason why – Facebook does a lot of optimization automatically. Depending on which campaign objective you choose, Facebook will try to generate the least expensive results for you.

If you’re promoting an online store with Facebook advertising, you’ll want to choose either the ‘Send People To Your Website’ or ‘Increase Conversions objective’, because that’s what Facebook will optimize for – website clicks or website conversions. To use the latter you need to set up some additional tracking on your Shopify store, which we’ll cover next time.

This time, choose ‘Send People to Your Website’, enter the URL of the product you want to promote, and click “Set Audience & Budget”.

The next step in our Facebook ads guide is vital. For your Facebook advertising efforts to be effective you’ll need to specify the audience, the budget, and the schedule.

Select Your Audience:

Again, finding the right audience is absolutely critical for a successful campaign.

So you need to choose the location, age, gender, and language of your audience:

Then, plug one or a few interests you’ve already discovered into the Detailed Targeting section:

You can even use a combination of interests by using the Narrow Audience feature – e.g. targeting people who are interested in all of the above AND the Runkeeper app:

By doing that, you’ll make sure you’re reaching the most relevant audience, so the response to your ads will be higher too.

‘Better response’ will lead to cheaper clicks and more chances to get a sale. It’s one of the most beneficial aspects of Facebook advertising.

Set Your Budget & Schedule:

Once you’ve found an optimal audience, choose from a daily or lifetime budget, and enter how much you’d like to spend.

Then, choose whether to run it continuously or between a specific start and end date.

In the Advanced Budget Settings, you can also choose your bidding and optimization preferences.

It deserves a separate article just for this one topic, but I’d generally suggest to begin with the default options: optimizing for link clicks to your website or website conversions and using automatic bids.

Once you’re happy with the Settings, click “Choose Ad Creative” to create the actual ads.

Design Your Ads:

This is one of the most important aspects of our Facebook advertising guide. For the ad creative, select to create a new ad or choose an existing post that you’ve already published on your page.

Also, decide whether you want to use a single image or video in your ads, or go with multiple images (also known as carrousel or multi-product ads):

If you wanted to promote a few products from the same category in one ad, go with the multiple images format. If you have just one specific offer, choose single image format.

Next, choose what will be the media for your ads: images, slideshow, or a video. I would suggest to begin with using images for your ads:

You can select up to 6 images when creating a new Facebook advertising campaign, which will create up to 6 ad variations in your campaign.

By creating a few ads, you can quickly see which image is working the best. You can choose this one and pause the other ads to save your ad budget.

You can also check out our video tutorial for creating a banner which will help your Facebook ads convert here:

After images, move on to the text part of your Facebook ad.

Here, choose the Facebook page you will be running the ads from – you can also choose to remove it, but that will stop you from running the ads in the mobile news feed or desktop news feed, which you don’t want.

You can connect your Instagram account too, if you wanted to show your ads on Instagram.

Then, enter the headline and text that will be used for your ad and choose an optional call-to-action button. Text will appear above the image and the headline immediately below it.

For the headline you have a character limit of 25 symbols, and for a post text, you have 90 characters.

When you’re using Facebook advertising it’s best to use just one placement whenever possible: if you choose multiple ad placements, Facebook will again try to optimize your campaign and will usually push most of your budget to mobile devices.

If that’s what you want, great. But if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, this could lead to getting a ton of mobile traffic with very few checkouts. This will mean that you’re wasting some of your valuable funds on Facebook advertising, which is something you’ll need to avoid.

I also recommend to not use the Audience Network placement – they include third party apps and websites that are outside of Facebook and usually don’t generate the results you want. What’s worse, you can’t control the context of those websites, so your ad might be showing up to the right audience but on a very strange piece of content.

And once you’re happy with all of the above, click “Review Order”, double check your campaign settings, and click “Place Order”.

Congratulations – you’ve just created your first Facebook advertising campaign!

3. Facebook Advertising Guide: After

In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll master how to get better insight into your ad effectiveness by analyzing reports.

It’s a fact that you’ll have some countries, age groups, gender, interests, placements, and ads performing better than the others.

What’s truly amazing is that you can find all that information in the Facebook Ad Reports, so make it a habit to come back every few days and evaluate your campaigns.

For example, you can check the Performance & Clicks report to see how the ad is doing overall.

As a rule of thumb, aim to achieve at least 1% click-through rate on Desktop News Feed or Mobile News Feed.

If you’re getting a very high click-through rate, then your offer, audience and ad design, work well. If you see that you’re not getting, at minimum, 1% click-through rate, you will want to continuing testing. To make the most out of your Facebook advertising campaigns you can test other products, or other audiences. It’ll help your ecommerce store grow in the long run.

Also, see how many clicks you’re receiving and what is the cost per click for different ads and audiences. This will help you plan your future advertising campaigns.

Finally, check your Facebook ad campaigns by different breakdowns:

With Breakdown, you can very quickly analyze your results by various segments. For example, different countries, age, gender and placement, and identify any hidden gems that work well.

Find those hidden opportunities, edit your ad campaign, and focus on those components that are bringing the best results.

If you’re looking for more info, you can also check out our video guide to optimizing your Facebook ads below:

Facebook Ads Guide Conclusion:

Congratulations! You’ve finished this Facebook Ads guide. Now you know all about Facebook advertising for beginners. You’re ready to create your first Facebook advertising campaign to promote your e-Commerce products.

Also, You can research audiences, choose your campaign settings, and design your ads.

You should also be comfortable with analyzing your campaign performance by reviewing different performance metrics. For example, click-through rates, cost per click, and breakdowns, which will lead to much better advertising decisions.

Now, it’s time you follow these steps above and create your first successful Facebook ad campaign.

Grate article, I will be very glad if you can share more light on Audience Research because I think reaching out to potential audience is our #1 advertisement priority.

Ahmed Zakaria

So much awesome your store
How did you do that?
Which theme using Shopify
And how is your daily revenue ?
I’ll be glad if you share with me your thoughts, We can share ideas
Just message me in Facebook: m.me/AhmedZecoo

Hi Adomas. Thank you so much for this great article. Awesome content! Everything is there including links to outside resources and tools to help with certain aspects of launching a campaign. I am a real estate agent and just left my team so I am looking for innovative ways to generate leads instead of the traditional industry methods of cold calling and door knocking. I came across your site and podcast at the perfect time. It will take me months to go through all the content but it will be well worth it. Thank you for your generosity and sharing your knowledge. Your content has a real impact on small businesses like mine.
David!http://flashreviewz.com/

Ricardo Salcedo R.

!YEAH………..

Leo Lei

I believe Facebook Ads has changed, and we’re not able to target audiences that are fans of other pages anymore. The only exception is when a page is very very popular with a lot of likes, then occasionally those pages will pop up in the “interests” category.